The incredible sequence in ‘Dune: Part Two’ and how it was made.
Right before Dune: Part Two was released, audiences could get a glimpse of Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) first and amazingly successful attempt at wormriding via a special clip in IMAX screenings and then online.
That official video is online and I’ve embedded it below (although I strongly advise people to see the film to get the full impact of the sequence).
In addition, production visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert shared on the official production notes for the film a few details about how the complex sequence came together. Here are those details, below.
“Denis is very conscious of what works in VFX and what doesn’t. One of our first Zoom calls with the crew prior to going to Budapest was to talk about how we were going to do the worm riding sequence, because Denis had this amazing pitch for how he wanted it to work. Basically, a Fremen would put a thumper down into the top of a dune. And the worm would come for the thumper and the dune would collapse. And the idea is that the Fremen is on top of the collapsing dune, and that’s how they get onto a worm.
There were a lot of discussions as to just how we were going to pull that amazing visual off, and one of the challenges for us to be able to come up with was the visual of Paul running onto a worm, with Chani and the other Fremen watching. It involved rebuilding part of the top of the sand dune in another location, where we could control things and have cranes, and we put three tubes inside the dune, which would be pulled by industrial tractors.
We’d have a stuntperson—Lorenz Hideyoshi, in this case, Timothée’s stunt double—attached to a safety wire and he would run. The tubes would pull out. The sand would collapse, and Lorenz would fall down the top of the dune into the swirling dust below, kicking up sand. We had to get the timing right, the camera had to follow, and so on. It took some practice runs over a few days because the reset was quite long, but it worked out really well!
Then my team extended it out in CG using plates and aerial photography, making you feel like Paul is a lot higher up, and then of course adding the CG worm. For the actual ride, we have him on a gimble, so we can change the angle of the platform, surrounded by a huge sand-colored enclosure that would get lit by the sun and bounce strong sand- colored light onto Paul. We shot aerial photography that would be the surrounding landscape, while always blasting a lot of sand onto Paul. When all combined, it feels like Paul is riding on a worm in the desert!”
